July 28, 2010

The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Where does the amount $320,000 come from? It's "the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers." And that's not counting the social and psychological values that may flow from excellent early schooling. But salaries aren't calculated by the actual benefit the employee bestows on the clients. If it did, there would be some negative numbers. But what if kindergarten teachers were very highly paid? Different individuals would pick kindergarten teaching for a career....

That process for figuring out how much these hypothetical students will make to come up with the hypothetical teacher salary smacks of the same hubris of knowledge that is displayed by some higher-evolved primates guessing the amount of mass in the universe from their woefully inadequate point of view atop a small mudball circling a rim star system in a fringe galaxy.

Roughly equivalent to guessing the number of grains of sand on a beach when you're smaller than a single grain.

From the article: "Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance"

They hit the nail on the head right here. I've noticed a lot that people who are poor tend to be so because they do things that make them poor- don't plan, look for easy ways out (like the lottery or high interest debt), don't put forth the full effort in jobs, don't delay gratification, can't just be nice to people who have the power to help them, etc. (BTW, I think this same sort of behavior explains much of why there's such a correlation between poverty and obesity (maybe not the niceness part).)

None of the behaviors that make a person poor are really about intellegence. We've all known smart people who do stupid things. They are about "patience, discipline, manners, perseverance." These are things that really are learned at an early age, hopefully through parents, but maybe through school. And we can't test it and often don't do a good job at teaching it.

Now the question becomes: What did these teachers do to instill these values in the kids? (I'd bet it doesn't involve political correctness or "sensitivity" to their "culture".)

This is grasping for results with insufficient data. Having watched kindergarteners pretty closely, by having several kids go though the process in recent years (the last being last year)--both in public and parochial schools, I think this story misses the mark. A good school enviroment certainly helps and can probably mitigate (but not solve) a bad upbringing. A poor school can probably negatively affect a good upbringing. And of course, every kid has his or own strengths and challenges.

But the biggest positive difference you can do for your kids is to read to them.

The problem isn't that some teachers are much, much better than average. The problem is that some teachers are much, much worse than average. The goal needs to be to weed out the worst teachers in the face of resistance from unions whose leadership regards the ability to keep bad teachers hired is a mark of their clout (after all, any union boss can keep a good teacher employed, but only someone with serious clout can keep bad teachers around).

The thing is, if you get a couple drinks into some teachers and administrators, it turns out that everybody in the school knows who these bad teachers are. Unless the adminstrators are total fools, they know who the bad teachers are. The good teachers certainly know who their incompetent teachers are. Savvy, well-networked, parents quickly learn who they are. The bad teachers probably even know themselves that they're bad teachers. What I find reprehensible is that oftentimes the response of school principals is to assign the brightest students to the worst teachers because there's always a chance that the kids can learn the material despite the teacher. Only in the good old US of A would the "reward" for being a good student be that you get to have the worst teachers.

What if - just pretend with me now - you take every Fortune 1000 CEO in the United States, divide the amount of school districts by the number of CEO's, and put every Ceo in charge of a number of districts, with the caveat of receiving bonus of, say 25 million for the success in making every child read, comprehend and write above grade level.

A $25 billion fantasy, but, wouldn't those talented people already making the big bucks figure out how to do it?

Impossible to guess the real explanation for the Project Star results without more data, but my guess would be that the following statement in the article is false:

The differences were too big to be explained by randomness.

Researchers tend to underestimate the effects of randomness, particularly if they already have some idea of the effect they would like to find. How big a difference was there between the performance of the various classes and what are the odds that that type of variation could be random? I'm not really inclined to take the study's word for it that the differences couldn't be random without more information.

If rhhardin were Karl Marx, he's spend 95,000 pages trying to get his lazy, arrogant head around what rhhardin so helpfully explained, and also rail about the injustice of it all, and everyone would think rhhardin was a sooper jean-yus.

If the study is accurate (and I have doubts about that) then it would also seem to indicate that the teaching and supervisory techniques used in kindergartens of the 1980s were working very well indeed. In the decades since then, we've dramatically increased school spending and spawned an entire industry of "early education" majors. What have we gotten in return?

Purely an anecdote, but I've lived in two different towns, in completely different regions, that had county lines running smack dab through the metro. While curriculum was very similar in all cases, the spending levels per student were wildly divergent. In both towns, the school systems that spend less per student had better grades.

I certainly believe that there is a minimum per student a society can expect to spend before results drop off (after all, you have to heat the school in winter, right?), but I'm not convinced just throwing taxpayer money at schools is the answer.

$320K extra money earned for a class over a lifetime. That means they need to figure in all the teachers, doesn't it? In junior high and high school I had a lot of teachers. Also, it's not such a big number. If you assume 20 kids per class, then each student earns an extra $16K over a career? Perhaps they need a pay cut then.

When a lot of the people who partake of this blog were that age, you went straight to first grade, no kiddie garter, no pre-K (glorified baby sitting). This is the case for The Zero's Teacher Bailout.

PS The teacher unions' concern for their charges may best be summed up in the words of Albert Shanker, "When school children start paying union dues, that 's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.".

4% of the teachers being "bad" will negatively affect about 25% of the students. (i.e. In an elementary school, grades K-5, with four classes per grade, each teacher will have about 25% of the students that come through that school.) That's why being able to get rid of bad teachers is so important. But by far the biggest factor is parental involvement. That can overcome bad teachers, or waste good teachers.

I have an idea. How about society pays me, my kids' dad, "the present value of the additional money that a [good, family-supported student] can expect to earn over [his or her] career." I'll split the dough with my wife.

I don't know if this explains the failings of modern education. While an involved parent certainly makes a difference, when I was a child most parents were not involved much back then either. I don't think parent involvement is really what has changed. I think it's the culture, which informs the parents, teachers and students. A big part of that is a feedback loop where schools teach students who then grow up to teach the next one. Each generation of that loop has shifted us away from fundamental values that made better students and toward others that often are counter to the hard work and expansion of learning.

Kindergarten teachers are already highly paid. Teachers, on average, make twice as much money as other workers. Thanks to their union and its collusion with government officials, teachers make astounding sums of money when compared to other workers.

It's not even close.

Get your facts straight, Ann. We can't have an honest discussion about overpaid teachers in this country when pundits like you refuse to acknowledge that teachers are already receiving out-sized salaries, benefits and pensions.

Oh, wait ... you're a grossly overpaid public school teacher too, right? ..... Ah, now it all begins to makes sense.

Answer: when employers figured out that women will work for less than men will - and started hiring women instead of men and pocketing the difference.

(Women will work, on average, for 75% of what a man would).

Since women largely would rather work than raise children (even at the price of unemploying their husbands and lowering their entire family's standard of living), someone has to raise their children for them.

It has, in a number of ways. Probably the most significant are that too many parents don't hold children accountable, and try to push off the responsibility for teaching onto the schools. (Note that I said "too many parents", not all.) The most obvious manifestation of this is the social promotion policy of many school districts, which then results in high school graduates with minimal skills.

The difference in K-6 from my when my oldest son (now 19) went through and my youngest, now in 1st grade, is striking. On the one hand, it has never been easier (via the internet) to be more involved in the day to day classroom operations such as activities, homework, grades, etc. On the other, the schools simply aren't challenging the kids to excellence like they used to. They seem to be far more aimed at minimizing liability and promoting self-esteem than they are in teaching.

I don't know if it's related, but I did three of my college years before going into the service. When I went back to that same state school afterward to finish up (almost 10 years later) it was like being in another school. Where once the profs gave you a basic syllabus, reduced grades for non-attendance, and forced you to do homework/reading/etc, now they spoon feed you with what's going to be on tests, very few knock students for attendance, and only a couple of classes had cumulative finals.

I would suggest instead of doing this or paying teachers more, we have sort of a jury duty for parents, where they will be paid to come in and help out. This would increase the number of adults helping the kids, and also monitor the teacher.

There was a letter to the editor recently. A teacher wrote that he taught in a school district with 2000 students and 150 or so teachers. On Parents Night, he claimed the teachers outnumbered the parents.

As in Finland, I say if we are gonna pay more, then larger classes with a second teacher assisting to help pull slower kids along. This seems exactly like what is needed. Smart kids need the teacher to keep moving, and the slower kids need to keep up, so give them help. Just paying the single teacher more solves nothing for the students.

DBQ, there is no test. Repeated studies have, in fact, found that kindergarten is completely useless. Structured education before the age of 7 is largely a waste of money with some evidence that it can be harmful.

Kindergarten and first grade are government day care. The calls for increasing head start and nursery school are also nothing more than increasing government day care.

(It goes further. All that push about getting your kids to read early? Waste of time. Yes, someone will start screaming about how this isn't true blah blah blah. Sorry, but it is. The only studies that find the opposite aren't studies at all, but opinion papers with enough statistics and scientific sounding terms to masquerade as science.)

Why don't we just speak plainly here and just say that we would rather use the approach used in the movie Gattaca to genetically sort through those that are desirable vs. those who aren't and move society in that direction. Simple enough? Let's just cut out the middle man completely. No need to go through this farce of paying teachers gobs of money to qualify little Johnny or Jane for a better life.

The real question that isn't being asked is that there have been billions upon billions, if not trillions spent on schools in the US and on teachers salaries as negotiated by their wretched unions. We also have gotten to watch our school systems deteriorate into a miasma of mediocrity, malaise, if not downright dilapidation in the last few decades. What has that money been wasted on? Where did that money go and why is the value of that money not even a remote ROI given how much has been doled out?

Findland does school right and has been the model for my proposals, save for the lack of tuition after age 16 (public education from age 7 to 16, vocational school for two years and only then university OR advanced vocational school.)

The point again is that we start formal comprehensive schooling too early and keep it going too long. It gets very repetitive with obviously poor results. (Of course, I'll also discard almost all extra curricular activities and greatly reduce music and sports programs, which don't do what is claimed. Want to play ball, join your community league, want to be in a play, go to your local theater company.)

I'm not going to cite any studies about K/1st grade being useless or harmful. All I know about the subject is what my four kids have shown. Before Kindergarten, yeah, they could read a little bit and do finger math. They could tell a little time on the clock and knew their days of the week etc, etc. Basic 4-5 year old stuff.

After a year of kindergarten, they read very well, did decent arithmetic including simple multiplication, knew their months and holidays, etc. You know, the absolute basics. Things a first grade teacher doesn't need to more than touch on as long as the parents are engaged.

As for me, I have kids and kindergarten was fine for them, but I don't know that it mattered much. Cognitive development proceeds apace independent of schooling. Anecdotally my son, after doing fine in Kindergarten, pretty much wasted a year in first grade because he had a lousy teacher. That didn't stop him from becoming one the better students in second grade when he had a very good teacher.

Studies of Head Start show that any advantages children gain in pre-K programs vs. their non-pre-K peers simply disappears by grades 1 or 2. Once a kid's brain develops, they can learn things like writing and arithmetic very quickly -- and easily catch up to those pushed into the system ahead of them.

In general I think we underestimate how quickly it is to learn things if you actually want to do so. I'm speaking of both kids and adults.

After a year of kindergarten, they read very well, did decent arithmetic including simple multiplication, knew their months and holidays, etc. You know, the absolute basics. Things a first grade teacher doesn't need to more than touch on as long as the parents are engaged.

Do you have kids Joe?

Four.Now 14-22.

You entirely miss the point and fall into the fallacy of learning early is the same as learning effectively. Learning all that stuff in kindergarten is no different in a very few years than learning it in second grade.

Put another way, does academic success in kindergarten have any predictive value for academic success in high school? The answer is an unequivocal no.

Furthermore, highly structured learning before age 7 can cause children quite a bit of stress, which is harmful, with no upside.

(Looking at my own kids, I find very little correlation between success in elementary school and how well they did once they hit puberty. All my children did spectacular in elementary school. By eight grade, two were struggling, yet at 17 my oldest finally pulled her head out of her butt and started racking up straight A's again. Take away the lazy factor [mostly turning in homework and papers late] and where each child has struggled isn't always where they struggled in elementary school. Son #1 hates reading, but writes extremely well [and in a stroke of genius, he once wrote a very good book "report" on a book that didn't exist.] I loved reading, but hated English class and was surprised to get my highest score on my ACT in English. Go figure.)

I'm still not convinced and, again, I have only me and mine, including the extended family on both sides (just oodles of friggin kids, given the Scots/Irish one one side and the Irish Catholics on the other) to go by.

After years of doing my best (learning myself as my wife and I went along) to shepard four kids through school, I learned that it's just not that complicated. We stayed after them, helped them with their studies, made homework a priority over anything else, and became friends with more than one of their teachers.

Granted the youngest just started, but she's following the same arc the other three did. I don't know if it matters, but all of them were forced to learn piano. Rumor has there are (shudder) studies that prove it makes for better academic success.

The only stumble we had was my oldest son. He wanted to be a fighter pilot from age 10. Scary dedicated to it and geared everything toward the USAF academy. I actually downplayed it propping up a "normal" college life, but helped him every where I could. As a junior, he took a friend of his to a recruiter he knew. The sergeant showed the kid the bubble test for color vision. My son, who had never been tested, was shocked (so were we) that we was red-green sufficient. Needless to say, this sucked the life out of his senior year. He went from honors classes to regular classes and got B's and C's.

That has zero to do with cognitive development and everything to do with his entire world crashing down on him through no fault of his own.

My point being that I don't put a lot of stock in the conclusion these eduction academics come up with. Sure, that lines up with your "people will say they don't believe it" but I've got strong reason not to.

My ten year old sister was furious to find out last weekend that her sister (me) and her parents voted for Bush in 2004. "He destroyed the environment, and it will take 24 years to fix it." I assume this is the sort of "science" they're testing on in public school now.

I agree that a good elementary school teacher can make a big difference for a child, and there's a wide gulf between a good elementary teacher and a bad one.

I doubt that kindergarten is really that important compared to first, second, and third grade, though.

But blindly throwing more money at the problem won't work. As other commenters have noted, announcing "I will pay $100 per pound for a really nice steak" does not produce one of President Obama's Kobe beef ribeyes -- the free market doesn't work that way.

Note that the best teachers are often at private schools, and those teachers make less money. (And no, it's not just the fact that they get better, more motivated students -- I've met public and private school teachers, and there are fewer incompetents in private schools).

I assume that the reason that this is so is...teacher unions in public schools, that prevent administrations from getting rid of incompetents. That, and the fact that good teachers don't go into teaching for the money.

If we rid ourselves of the NEA and AFT, we'd have a renaissance in education.

And as long as teachers want to be unionized, like a tradesman, I see no reason to pay them or treat them like professionals, like doctors or lawyers. There's no doctors' union.

"The sergeant showed the kid the bubble test for color vision. My son, who had never been tested, was shocked (so were we) that we was red-green sufficient."

Been there done that, but I didn't know until after I was offered an NROTC scholarship. My dad was in the navy and I wanted to be in the navy since I was at least 10 years old. Knocked the wind out of me too.

But the good news was the scholarship was awarded as a Marine option, something I never would have done on my own, as I would have been too intimidated. Turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

I think something like 8% of males have red-green color deficiency. Makes you wonder why stoplights are red and green and ships' running lights are red and green.

We now return to our discussion of education and how color vision can impact motivation.

I think something like 8% of males have red-green color deficiency. Makes you wonder why stoplights are red and green and ships' running lights are red and green

My mother and brother (natch) are color blind. Very rare for a woman to be color blind.

I read somewhere that it was a plus during WWII to be a colorblind navigator because you were better able to 'see through' the camouflage. I imagine there are other current occupations where it can be a positive condition.

Kindergarten was a waste of time for my daughter and for my brother, probably for me as well. My daughter was already reading at a 5th grade level by the age of 5 and had to be put into a 'special' class that caused her to feel weird.

My brother was a pain in the butt in kindergarten for the same reasons....he was bored out of his mind and made problems for the teacher....so to get rid of him...they skipped him into 3rd grade from kindergarten. Wreaked havoc on his social life in high school.

The one size fits all school system that we have is failing students on both ends of the bell curve.

ScottM, I'm talking about the movie "Little Miss Sunshine." I think it won a bunch of Oscars a few years ago. In it, a teen boy is serious about becoming an Air Force pilot and he finds out he's color-blind.

And a little chubby girl competes in a beauty pageant. Seriously, you've never seen it? I thought everyone had. It's a nice little movie.

Nope, never did see it, although it's got good company, I suppose with Crash, Million Dollar Baby, and Slumdog Millionare in the sense that they were all just must-see and i skipped them.

DBQ, if memory serves, the percentage of red/green colorblindness is much higher than 8%. I seem to remember it being over 20%, but that's just the ol' thinker going.

Traffic lights are no problem. It's really not reds and greens, but rather shades of reds and greens and how they occur together. A stop light is bright red and bright green, plus they are usually in the same place on the light.

Traffic lights are no problem. It's really not reds and greens, but rather shades of reds and greens and how they occur together. A stop light is bright red and bright green, plus they are usually in the same place on the light.

Take a look in the thread about disabilities re: my mother's auto accident because the lights were not standardized...way back when.

My brother isn't as bad, but my mother could not distinguish between red/green green/brown brown/dark blues blue/green red/brown or ANY pastel colors. I think she could see tones of those colors but they all looked the same to her. She liked bright orange and lime green...good thing it was the 70's. I always wondered what they looked like to her.

"Each generation of that loop has shifted us away from fundamental values that made better students and toward others that often are counter to the hard work and expansion of learning."

More to the point, about 1/3 of the students and parents do not give a rip. Maybe more. I used to blame teachers...now I think the reason they cling to their unions is because they are stuck in such an awful system with hopeless material to work with.

Except that that wouldn't have disastrous effects on public policy. (Energy, regulation, standard of living, etc. etc. etc.) Creationists aren't going to be passing any "No evolving over millions of years!" laws.